Supreme Court Talks Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them

That question came from Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. in arguments in the case of Xavier Alvarez, who falsely claimed to have been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and was prosecuted under a 2006 law that makes lying about receiving military honors a federal offense.

It was asked of Alvarez’s lawyer, Jonathan Libby, whose job Wednesday was to convince the justices that the law, the Stolen Valor Act, violates the First Amendment’s free-speech protections. (The WSJ’s Jess Bravin covered the arguments here.)

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